Mould and tile inspection Laser scanning tackles tight tolerances in tile manufacturing

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Producing roof tiles to within half a millimetre demands precise quality control. At BMI Group, a new LK laser scanning system streamlines mould and tile inspections, tackling wear issues and ensuring consistent production accuracy.

Few people outside the tile-making and building industry know that a good quality roof tile has to be manufactured to a tolerance as tight as plus or minus half a millimeter. It places a requirement on the research and development and quality control (QC) functions in that sector to measure prototype tiles and mass-produced tile samples to ensure they are accurate. Metrology staff also need to check the wear on moulds used to make the product, as well as the condition of tungsten carbide wear parts and steel tooling in the production machinery. Sometimes it is necessary to reverse-engineer replacement components for older machines to avoid delays in production, or to produce a CAD model to update a legacy tile, or inspect a 3D-printed item to assist a design process.

This is the scenario at the Crawley Technical Center of BMI Group, a leading manufacturer of flat and pitched roofing systems, where since July 2024 design engineer Luke Kelly and several of the team have been using a portable measuring arm inspection solution supplied by LK Metrology, Castle Donington. Superseding a smaller and now unsupported arm and touch probe, which was used alongside conventional, manually-intensive metrology equipment like callipers and height gages, the new inspection area comprises a 7-axis, multi-sensor Freedom Arm Classic Scan with a 2.73-meter reach equipped with a touch probe and an H120 laser line scanner, which since the end of 2023 has been manufactured by LK following its acquisition of Nikon Metrology's laser scanner hardware and software business. Together with a rotatable, 300 mm diameter Freedom Index Table, the lightweight carbon fibre arm is mounted on a metrology table, all elements supplied by LK. Additionally, Innovmetric’s Polyworks Inspector software was purchased from reseller 3D Scanners (UK) to provide advanced point cloud analysis, evaluate surfaces, measure geometrical features, generate colored heat maps for part-to-CAD or scan-to-scan comparisons, and generate full reports.